I’m down in the Puna District taking some shifts caregiving for Queen B. In some ways, it’s a good fit for me. I understand the pathology and the physiology and I have the vocabulary and some relevant experience. I am often struck, though, how little of my medical education provided the skills one needs to be a caregiver. In fact, there were times when I felt actively prevented from taking on that role with my patients — even terminally ill folks getting hospice care. People were constantly reminding me that my doctoring skills were desperately needed elsewhere.
B has a circle of amazing friends, but so far everyone who has come here to help — friends taking caregiving shifts and professional staff — are women. I’m the only exception. On top of that, while they’re giving up their sleep and leisure time and time with family, they seem to want to also take care of me. HA made me a sandwich and packaged up some leftover pasta and pizza to send with me. Even Queen B herself wanted me to know that there were ingredients for Reuben sandwiches and she said that she and the head caregiver should make one for me. I was touched, and I do appreciate the thought, but we all (especially B) have much more important things to do than to feed twoprops. I am hardly a helpless kitchen-incompetent man who will starve to death unless I’m provided food by the people I came here to help. Again, I’m appreciative of the thoughtfulness, but I wonder at the societal expectations that put me at the receiving end of those thoughts.
I had a great aunt who was a physician, but that was unusual, indeed. It was also over sixty years ago. By the time I was in medical school, thirty years or so ago, my class was (just) over half women. (Amusingly, the adjacent VA hospital had three locker rooms in the operating theatre: “Men,” “Women,” and “Doctors.“) Three decades isn’t enough time to eliminate disparity. Powerful (“senior”) positions in medicine are still predominately held by men. But things have visibly shifted and I don’t think there are many people left in Western society who are surprised to encounter a woman working as a doctor. Nor, for that matter, a man working as a nurse. But my experience with home care and home hospice care both formally and when caregiving teams form up organically among friends and family is that the people doing the caregiving are overwhelmingly women.
I cannot help but feel that, in a better world, that would not be so.
—2p